Controlling devices, for example remote controls, for use in issuing commands to entertainment and other appliances, and the features and functionality provided by such controlling devices are well known in the art and have become ubiquitous in the home. Increasingly in today's environment, such controlling devices are used to interact with displayed menu systems, browse web pages, etc., and perform other similar activities which may require entry of text data such as URLs, search terms, messages, etc. In such instances entry of text data may be facilitated by the provision of qwerty keypad functionality as part of a controlling device. Further, as a result of the increasing complexity of modern appliance feature sets, in other instances it has become desirable to offer the user of such an appliance both a simplified controlling device keypad supporting commonly-used appliance functions and a secondary keypad supporting less frequently used appliance functionalities, or alternatively to distribute the increasingly large number of available functions across multiple keypads in order to reduce visual clutter. Accordingly, controlling devices which support various combinations of keypad input mechanisms across multiple surfaces are becoming increasingly common.